Video surveillance systems are often deployed in schools, government buildings, small businesses, retail stores and corporate offices, and even many residences. These surveillance systems are typically comprised of surveillance cameras that capture image data, image data storage systems that store the image data along with possibly metadata, and increasingly analytics systems that analyze the image data and possibly generate the metadata.
The analytics systems are becoming increasingly powerful. Often, the analytics systems will track moving objects against fixed background models. More sophisticated functions include object detection to determine the presence of an object or classify the type of object or event. The analytics systems generate video primitives or metadata for the detected objects and events, which the analytics systems can further process or send over the data networks to other systems for storage and incorporation into the image data as metadata, for example.
While analytics systems have historically been separate systems apart from the surveillance cameras, the surveillance cameras themselves are increasingly providing this functionality. Integrating the analytics functionality within the cameras themselves has advantages. It eliminates the cost and maintenance associated with deploying a separate analytics system to accomplish the same objective, and enables more efficient analysis by eliminating the messaging overhead associated with sending the image data over the data network for analysis by the separate analytics systems.